This is a discussion on Are personalities inherited? within the INFP Forum - The Idealists forums, part of the NF's Temperament Forum- The Dreamers category; Do you inherit a mixture of your parents personalities? Or do you get your personality just out of the blue?...

Are personalities inherited?

I was taking to a professional psychologist yesterday and the types seem to be fixed. However, not all psychologists agree. Situationalist adaptation (her words). My reply: an overlay program. Then I mentioned that some types are hard to recognise at first because of what I call the masquerade, but they have another word which I have forgotten what she said.

yeah as INFP i don't think i inherited any part of it from parents personalities... i suspect it has something to do with who we are as our higherselves as well as socialization, and having to deal with the parent's personalities, as opposed to inheriting them maybe... i have an INFP friend who grew up with many similar forces as i did, interestingly our sisters are both ENFJ and our parents's personalities seem very similar, like, i don't think we inherited their personalities, but having to deal with their personalities may have had something to do with our INFPness. what i think is most interesting is how her and i are very very different people, yet our INFPness is very distinct in us both, and we seem to have had parallel experiences in life... similar traumas, etc.

i would say that for the most part we are all born the same, some more or less, but there is an average level of genetical inheritance, then the rest comes from our experiences of life, which is what really whittles our personalities.

so i agree with peace passion where we would probably develop our personality types from early interacting with our parents, simply learning to adapt to them. that would be why we can be so contradictory yet so compatible with those closest to us.

I've seen it discussed any number of times. People trying to draw correlations between a person's parents' types and their own. It just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Patterns don't develop. However, I do believe that our types are impressed upon us extremely early on and, with a great many fewer exceptions than some would have you believe, remain static from that point on. As such, our experiences build upon that framework as it grows around us; both personality and developing evermore as we progress through our life. The more people change, the more they stay who they've always been.

What we get from our parents isn't our type. At least not in any readily apparent sense. Instead, we receive our earliest socialization and knowledge of the world around us. It seems to me that, in some sense, we often either spend our lives attempting to reconcile who each our parents* represent to us into ourselves, or, if that proves to be either reprehensible or impossible, living in diametric opposition to their apparent ideologies. Best enemies, as it were.

*Naturally, I use the term 'parents' loosely here. What I refer to at this point are the people who raise us and are the largest influences on us during our formative years.

I could see it being like eye color; maybe; If I believed they personalities could be inherited.

How would this theory work? In the same way. Two Brown eyed people (say ISTPs) could make a Blue eyed child (INFJ) but two Blue eyed people couldn't make a Brown eyed child.

However, I believe that you're born with a set of personalities you could be, say me for example. I could have been ENTP/ESTP/ENTJ/ENFJ & than I was influenced by my own choices, and the environment and became an ENTP.

I don't think it's inherited per se, but that it is genetic. Of course genes are inherited, but I don't think there are any genes that are "personality" genes that can be passed down -- it doesn't follow the dominant/recessive pairing. I believe various genes that control the development of the brain affect which functions you're going to prefer. It's like handedness and brain hemisphere preference. The way the brain is wired causes preferences. Even scientists today aren't completely sure what causes specific handedness, or function preferences. Any two parents can have children of any type, and in some ways it's seemingly random.